March 26, 2008
A summary of daily news relevant to the federal workforce produced by the Partnership for Public
Service.
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Top Jobs in Government Increasingly Filled From Outside
The Washington
PostBy Stephen Barr
For decades, the government has hired at lower grade levels and encouraged employees to work their way to the top. But a study released yesterday
suggested that agencies are increasingly turning to job seekers from outside the government to fill upper-level jobs.
Many of the upper-level jobs filled by these outsiders were in occupations involving technology, homeland security and national defense --
all priorities of the government since 2000.
The majority of the people hired for upper-level positions had substantial work experience and, to some extent, might not be considered as true
newcomers to government.
About one-third had worked for a federal contractor, and 16 percent had served in the military and Coast Guard. An additional 23 percent said they
joined the government after working in the private sector.
The trend of hiring from outside the government for top positions is likely to continue, as more federal employees retire and as federal programs
require expertise in new, complex fields and specialties, said the report prepared by the Merit Systems Protection Board.
The board, which monitors the civil service and makes recommendations to the White House and Congress, conducted the study as part of an ongoing
project to assess whether the government is as competitive as it should be in attracting and hiring highly skilled workers.
The board's study defined upper-level positions as grades 12 through 15 of the General Schedule, the top rungs of the government's largest pay and
job classification system. The board reviewed data from 1990 to 2005 and surveyed a random sample of outsiders hired by Uncle Sam in fiscal 2005.
Of the 41,000 people brought in to the government at all GS levels in fiscal 2005, more than 12,000 were upper-level hires, the study found. That
is 39 percent more than the 8,600 outsiders hired in fiscal 1990, the year before federal agencies underwent nearly a decade of post-Cold War
downsizing.
The study did not look at the percentage of top federal jobs that are filled by people who already work in the government and are promoted to the
upper levels. Estimates vary by agency and occupation, but, overall, 80 to 85 percent of upper-level jobs are filled from inside the government.
The board's study found that federal managers, probably more than in the past, consider applicants from outside government because they are
committed to hiring the best qualified applicants and want to improve the quality of their workforce.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, also have influenced hiring patterns.
The departments of Defense and Homeland Security have filled more upper-level jobs with new employees who are experts in security management,
logistics and intelligence, the study said.
Veterans have increasingly filled many upper-level jobs. In 2005, 42 percent of upper-level hires had served in the military, a 12 percent
increase since 2001, the study said.
The majority were hired through the 1998 Veterans Employment Opportunity Act, which Congress approved to give former military personnel the
opportunity to compete for jobs that are normally not open to outsiders.
When applying for a job under the law, veterans give up any preferences based on their military service. The study found that former military
officers appear to be considered as ideal job applicants because of their experience in security, logistics, contracting and intelligence and because
they often hold security clearances.
Federal agencies also hired for expertise in information technology, medicine and law when filling upper-level positions, the study found.
The average age of these upper-level hires from outside government in 2005 was 43 1/2 . They were largely male (71 percent) and white (78
percent), the study found.
Asked to select all possible reasons, from a list of 16 choices, to explain why they applied for a federal job, nearly half of the new employees
said they wanted more job security.
Other reasons were the appeal of an agency's mission, the chance to fully use their talents, the opportunity to serve the public, the desire for a
better job, and employment benefits.
Those findings, said Neil A. G. McPhie, chairman of the merit board, "suggest that government service has strengths that agencies can capitalize
to compete for highly skilled workers."
Generations are in Sync on Quality of Work Life, Says Panel
Government Executive
By Brittany R. Ballenstedt
Despite some well-documented generational differences, baby boomers and millennials essentially need the same thing from their federal jobs:
strong leadership and flexible pay.
To combat the retirement wave now cresting in agencies and retain a diverse workforce, the federal government needs to focus on leadership, pay
and hiring reform, panelists said Tuesday at a breakfast sponsored by Government Executive.
Chris Myers Asch, one of the architects behind a proposal to create a public service academy, said agency human resource leaders should not
consider the wants of generations X and Y unrealistic. "We treat the millennials and Gen-Xers as these alien breeds coming in," he said. "If [other
generations] think about what they want now and what they wanted when they started working, it's the same kinds of things. The only difference is we
have the technology now to do those things."
Robert Tobias, director of public sector executive programs at American University, said a retirement surge has caused agencies to stop yakking
and start acting on strategies to restock their ranks, and providing employees -- particularly younger workers -- with incentives to stay
in federal government is more challenging than recruiting. "I hope we don't have to talk this long about how to keep those we hire as we've talked
about how we're going to hire them," he said.
Tobias pointed to the 2007 Best Places to Work rankings published by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, noting that the two factors he
believed have the most impact on employee retention were leadership capacity and matching an employee's skills to the agency's mission. "When leaders
are credible, when they empower those they lead, when they act with integrity ... employees will not only stay, they'll max their contribution to
the organization," he said.
Ron Sanders, chief human capital officer at the National Intelligence Directorate, said the intelligence community has "passed the tipping point"
as far as younger hires, noting that nearly 50 percent of the workforce has five years or less of service. The challenge, he said, is not recruiting
young talent but working through other obstacles, such as a lengthy security clearance process and a pay system that does not reward high
performance.
The intelligence community has established interim job centers to allow employees awaiting security clearance to perform unclassified work until
their clearance investigation is complete, Sanders said. The community also is working to establish a more robust pay system to help retain the best
and the brightest.
Sanders said the intelligence community struggles because of a lack of mid-level employees, and so must develop the younger generation as quickly
as possible. A new performance management system, implemented across the community earlier this year, evaluates every employee on their personal
leadership and integrity. "If you can lead yourself now, you're going to be prepared to lead others very, very quickly," he said.
Toni Dawsey, chief human capital officer at NASA, said the challenges at her agency were different from those in the intelligence community
because NASA's workforce is composed mostly of older employees. The result has been an increased focus on leadership training for employees at lower
grade levels to help fill the leadership void when baby boomers exit.
"We do not expect to have the retirement wave that other agencies will have; we expect ours to be 10 years behind everyone else," Dawsey said.
"Opening up training programs to the younger generation is how we will bring NASA into the future."
Sanders added that the millennial workforce's instinctive ability to collaborate is a great benefit to the intelligence community in particular.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, "people need to be communicating and sharing information across boundaries," he said. "This generation won't let anything
stand in their way of that."
Meanwhile, panelists also discussed how to manage a diverse workforce composed of civil servants, corporate contractors and nonprofit groups,
among others.
Sanders said that a communitywide downsizing in the 1990s required intelligence agencies to tap into their "reserves," or contract personnel,
resulting in an increased reliance on contractors to perform core mission functions.
For now, Sanders said, the intelligence community is working to restructure its contract system using a three-step process: inventory, doctrine
and mix. This involves ensuring the community has the right number of contractors, defining the optimum purpose for contractors, and determining the
make-up of the base civilian, contractor and military workforces.
NASA's Dawsey noted that the shuttle program, which expires in 2010, has 15,000 contractor employees, compared to 1,700 civil servants. The
agency, which will launch a program to help prepare for a mission to Mars, is working to restructure the multisector workforce to meet a more
ambitious exploration agenda and timeline. This involves "shuttle mapping," she said, where civil servants and contract employees coming off of the
shuttle program can determine whether their competencies align with the new mission.
"It's very eye-opening in terms of helping us drill down competencies," she said, "not only for our civil servants, but also
our contractors."
Search for Ranger Crewman Ends
Anchorage Daily NewsBy Megan Holland
When Capt. Craig Lloyd of the Coast Guard cutter Munro first heard the mayday call from the sinking ship 100 miles away in the early hours of
Sunday morning, he directed his crew to get to the scene fast.
Forty-seven lives were at stake on the foundering fishing boat. The water was 35 degrees. Seas were 20 feet. Snow squalls wailed around them. The
wind chill factor made the air temperature minus 24 degrees.
Lloyd set up his ship's mess hall for mass casualties, expecting the worst.
In the end, the Coast Guard and a nearby ship saved 42 of the 47 people. Four, including the catcher-processor's captain and his top two men,
perished. A search for a fifth crewman was called off late Monday night.
"The range of emotions is pretty vast," Lloyd said of his crew from a satellite phone aboard the Munro. "On the one hand, we saved 42 people. On
the other hand, we didn't do it perfectly."
As details became available Monday about the sinking of the 203-foot Seattle-based Alaska Ranger as it was on its way to mackerel fishing grounds
in the Bering Sea, what emerged was a story of a harrowing rescue effort involving some of the worst conditions on the high seas.
When the first rescuers arrived by helicopter about three hours after the mayday call, they found a grim scene.
They saw three strobe lights and figured those were the life rafts. As they got a little closer, there was a fourth light, a fifth, then a sixth,
and the numbers kept growing.
Then they did a quick big-picture scan and saw flashes over a milelong stretch, with no sign of the vessel. Each light was a person, they quickly
realized, floating in the water and fighting for life.
The chopper crew picked a spot and began slowly hoisting people out of the water, Lloyd said. They started with those not in life rafts, which was
the majority of the fishermen.
The Alaska Warrior, another catcher-processor also owned by Fishing Company of Alaska, which owned the Ranger, showed up about an hour later and
mostly picked up the survivors who had made it to the life rafts.
The four men who died -- captain Eric Peter Jacobsen, 65, of Lynnwood, Wash.; mate David Silveira, 50, of San Diego; chief engineer Daniel
Cook, in his mid-50s, of San Diego; and Byron Carrillo, believed to be from Seattle -- succumbed to hypothermia, Alaska State Troopers said.
They were likely in cold water for hours, said Sgt. Greg Garcia. One body was recovered by the Munro. The other three were taken aboard the Alaska
Warrior.
Garcia said initial reports are that the captain and his top staff were the last to get off the sinking boat.
The man lost at sea was fish master Satoshi Konno of Japan. He, as did all those aboard, abandoned ship wearing a survival suit, which greatly
increases the likelihood of survival by keeping the wearer afloat and at least somewhat warmer.
On Monday, 10-foot seas, 36-degree water and poor visibility in snowfall hampered efforts to find Konno. At 9:45 p.m. the Coast Guard called off
the search.
Konno's job on the ship was to help the skipper find mackerel and manage quality control for the fish, which is largely exported to Japan and
Korea, said company spokesman Mike Szymanski.
The Seattle-based ship first began taking on water at around 3 a.m. Sunday after losing rudder control in a mile-deep part of the Bering Sea about
120 miles west of the port of Dutch Harbor, the Coast Guard said.
The cause of the sinking is under investigation. A spokesman for the ship's owner said they did not have sufficient information to determine the
cause.
The crew abandoned the ship around 4:45 a.m. after the water coming in hit the generators and cut the power off, and the ship listed 45 degrees to
the port side, Lloyd said.
STACKING THEM IN
The first Coast Guard helicopter, an HH-60 Jayhawk, arrived at 6 a.m. The crew aboard the helicopter lowered a rescue swimmer into the water and
he began collecting survivors into a basket, which was then hoisted to the hovering chopper.
"They just started stacking them in," Lloyd said. They squeezed 12 fishermen into the tight space before they had to return to the Munro to
unload.
The 378-foot cutter was still about 75 miles away. By the time the helicopter delivered its first load of fishermen, nine of the 12 were able to
walk but three were not, Lloyd said. One man was unresponsive. Medics performed CPR on him for 45 minutes before he was declared dead, Lloyd said.
Some of the others were given warm IVs, and others were put in warm bags to bring up their dangerously low body temperatures.
"They were just kind of shivering and shaking, with their eyes wide open," Lloyd said of the survivors.
One fisherman didn't make it into the helicopter after he slipped from the basket and dropped 30 to 60 feet back into the ocean. The helicopter,
though, could not go back for him. It was out of fuel, the Coast Guard said, and had to return to the cutter immediately.
At one point, one of the two Coast Guard rescue swimmers gave up his seat on the helicopter and stayed on scene in a life raft while the chopper
went to refuel.
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